1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to improvements in home entertainment systems, particularly, to a system, method and apparatus for facilitating the usage of digital works.
2. Description of the Related Art
The growth of the Internet as a communication tool has been phenomenal. With the increasing usage of the Internet as a platform for business, staid industries are having to reinvent themselves to keep ahead of or keep pace with this technological wave.
The music industry has had to cope with advances in technology impinging upon artists' royalties and controlled dissemination. Prior to the invention of the Internet and its rise in massive popularity, digital music was distributed in fairly traditional ways. Music was recorded and then mastered and pressed to compact disc, which then acted as the physical medium that consumers purchased. Compact discs, by their nature, are limited to reproducing original mastered music at 44.1 kHz, but this reproduction offered the closest digital copy of the master that had ever been previously possible. To copy this music to another format for use on another unit besides a compact disc player, such as a cassette player, a person would have to make an analog recording of the music, usually on a cassette recorder that is physically attached to the audio out ports on the compact disc player. Digital Analog Tape and the MiniDisc faced similar limitations, namely the digital audio from the source had to be converted, at some point, to an analog signal for transfer to these mechanisms.
Personal computers offered a solution to this archival problem. Computers are able to read the music off a compact disc and then, using various software, can extract or “rip” the audio content from the CD for storage on the computer's hard drive. The majority of these ripping techniques still transferred the audio through a digital to analog to digital method, but some extractors kept the digital signal from beginning of extract to the end of archiving. This meant that a computer could save a large amount of compact disc content on a storage unit that allowed almost instantaneous access to individual songs from separate compact discs. Unfortunately, the file sizes of these songs were very large; a single song could easily require 50 megabytes of hard drive space. An entire CD could occupy 650 megabytes.
To ease this storage problem, several compression mechanisms and formulations were quickly introduced, the most popular being MPEG II layer III, commonly known as MP3. Audio content compressed using the mp3 format could shrink in size to a tenth of its original with arguably little or no loss in quality from the compact disc master. At the same time, the Internet's progression and connection to millions of personal computers enabled people to share their music files with each other, although this was at first a difficult exercise since one computer would need the physical address of another computer to transfer files. Services such as public anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites, digital bulletin board services, and client-based server programs such as Hotline, acted as conduits and repositories for this compressed music, but most of these services were underground and difficult for the average user to find, much less operate.
The advent of peer-to-peer file sharing made transferring digital music files between disparate computers on the Internet a trivial matter. Peer-to-peer technology allows one computer to broadcast its list of music files to either a centralized computer that maintains an index of files or broadcast its ability to share files, which other computers on the network, or node of the network, recognize and then build their own index. Peer-to-peer file sharing avoids placing the physical media on one central server or bank of computer servers, but rather allows each computer on the file sharing network to act as its own server, limited by its own connection to the Internet and its own computer processing power. Since peer-to-peer file sharing basically allows for an anonymous transfer of files from one computer to another with no layer in between and, regardless of the software facilitating the service and creating the index, makes it a very simple matter to find and exchange files, the technology by its very existence aids copyright infringement by its population of users, which in turn undermines the financial incentive for artists to continue creating original works of art.
The Internet and file sharing, however, are now technologies embraced by millions and millions of users and the thought of reverting to a closed technological system of recording compact discs to analog recordings is most certainly unacceptable. Conflicting with this methodology of sharing files are the artists and music labels who have a great interest in protecting their work from illegal copying and distribution. At the same time sharing video content, which is still in its infancy because of compression techniques, requires a method that will protect the original content yet retain the simplicity of peer-to-peer sharing.
The ease of copying digital works has resulted in a dilemma to copyright owners in a work, such as music encoded per MP3, i.e., how to utilize this new digital medium but maintain control over the work? In other words, the music industry and the artists are trying to prevent unlicensed dissemination of the work.
There is, therefore, a need for a system, method and apparatus that facilitates the dissemination of a protected digital work while at the same time maintaining control over its dissemination.